Who was the first player born in the 1990s to win an international cap?

Plus: multiple captains in a single game; Club shops in shirt shenanigans; and has a goalkeeper ever been booked for diving? Send your questions and answers to
knowledge@theguardian.com and follow
@TheKnowledge_GU

Norway's Martin Odegaard: knee high to a grasshopper and imminent international footballer. Photograph: Tor Erik Schroeder/AP

Who was the first player born in the 1990s to win an international cap?

Plus: multiple captains in a single game; Club shops in shirt shenanigans; and has a goalkeeper ever been booked for diving? Send your questions and answers to
knowledge@theguardian.com and follow
@TheKnowledge_GU

“With the news of 15-year-old Norwegian Martin Odegaard being called up to the senior squad, we inch closer and closer to the moment when the first footballer born in the 21st century plays an international match,” notices Alexandre Queirós. “And that raises the question: who was the first footballer born in the 90s to be capped for his country?”

Certain events are guaranteed to make you feel a little old – twinges in your hip, Mars bars getting smaller, things being far more expensive than they used to be – but nothing quite brings it home like the birthdates of professional footballers. You can be wandering along, enjoying your day, and then – bang – you notice someone who was born in 1999 making their debut for Rochdale. So if you’re getting towards the age where you feel that career as a footballer/video-game tester/astronaut/president might not happen, then brace yourself. This might be a difficult couple of paragraphs.

Several of you got in touch to point us towards the ever-excellent RSSSF’s page of youngest internationals. They suggest that MacDonald Taylor Jr’s debut for the US Virgin Islands against the Dominican Republic on 1 October 2006 was the first by any player born in the 1990s, Taylor Jr having been born on 22 March 1992.

And Tim’s on a roll: “If I am allowed to answer a question that was not asked, the first soccer player born in the 1980s to be capped must surely be Ghana’s Stephen Appiah who was born on December 24, 1980. On November 12, 1995, he represented his country in a 2-0 win over Sierra Leone at the age of 14 years and 323 days.

Meanwhile, Odegaard, if he does indeed make his Norway debut, could take the new mantle of the most-recently-born international from the hands of Northern Mariana Islands tyro Joel Fruit, who is an international footballer despite being born on 31 May 1998, just before the World Cup in France. Odegaard was born on 17 December 1998.

And after all that, we need a stiff drink – something for which, conveniently enough, you do need to be a certain age.

CAPTAIN CAROUSEL

“I noticed that the armband was passed on twice in Arsenal’s 0-0 draw against Besiktas in Turkey,” emails Peter O’Reilly. “What’s the record for a single game?”

Andrew Beasley points us towards the halycon days of 2003, when all this were fields, you could leave your front door unlocked when you went on holiday, and Sven Goran Eriksson was England manager.

“Back in the days when Sven was able to change an entire team at half-time and hand out caps like confetti, England had four captains in a match against Serbia & Montenegro in 2003,” writes Andrew. “Surely the likes of Beckham, Gerrard and rest of the infamous Golden Generation made up the four? Nope …”

Michael Owen began the friendly, being played at Leicester’s then Walkers Stadium, with the armband but, like half the team, he was substituted at the interval. Emile Heskey then took over the duties until the 61st minute, when he was replaced by Darius Vassell and the armband went to Phil Neville. Still with us? Good. Neville survived until the 88th minute when he was replaced by James Beattie, winning the second of his five caps, at which point Jamie Carragher, who had sprung from the bench midway through the second half, was made captain.

IN SHIRT SUPPLY

“Manchester United’s club shop has reportedly run out of the letter ‘r’ for their replica shirt printing,” writes Gareth Eales. “Are there other instances of similar football club-shop bother?”

Why yes, and where else to take you once again than 2003? It’s not yet another grasping excuse for The Knowledge to glug greedily from the fountain of eternal youth: 2003 really does have all the answers this week, and this one in fact owes plenty to a current Manchester United stalwart.

Wayne Rooney played for Everton back then, the precocious young buck making his full England debut at 17 that February. “Roo-mania” was sweeping the nation, and not in the way certain modern scaremongerers would have it. When England released yet another new shirt that spring, just in time to rise the wave of fans’ enthusiasm for absolutely no major tournament whatsoever, its sellers got far more than they had bargained for. “Rooney 9” was the nation’s shirt du jour, and the letters – as they do – flew off the shelves, laying bare a chronic shortage of letter Ys. That was the case in Liverpool, at least, although you would imagine that by August of the following year the lucky souls who got hold of one were more than happy to return them to the mix. Aflame.

Is the letter Y jinxed? Or perhaps just rare: there are only two of them in a Scrabble set. Cardiff City fans were left pondering this in 2010 when Craig Bellamy signed for his hometown club amid an understandable tide of local-boy-made-good emotion. The poor club shop assistant was forced to explain exactly why fans would have to make do with “Bellam” if they wanted their shirt now, now, now. At least Cardiff fans were magnanimous in their disappointment: “Despite not having his name on their shirt,” reads the Wales Online article, “Julie still has a lot of faith in Bellamy and believes he can take Cardiff City to the very top.” There, and back again. Y bother?

After Y comes Z, though, and they can keep each other company here. It may seem less than plausible now, but Aston Villa’s club shop really did once run out of Charles N’Zogbia Zs. According to the man himself, anyway. We’re told by Stefan Glosby that something similarly, and rather more understandably, occurred when Gianfranco Zola signed for Chelsea in 1996, too, but the interweb isn’t clever enough to stand that up for us.

Time to delve into some weightier apocrypha, and Crystal Palace will feel the force of our determined dredging for the next minute or two. First up is a tale from Eleanor Drywood, who tells us: “I thought you might be interested in a predicament faced by the Crystal Palace club shop in 2001 due to the increasing popularity of club legend and Finnish international Aki Riihilahti.”

We are, so please continue.

“At the end of his first season with the club, the shop found they could not meet the demand for the letter ‘i’, which appears no less than four times in his surname. Their solution? The club asked Riihilahti if he would change the name on the back of his shirt to Aki, quartering the demand for ‘i’s. As I recall, he refused on the basis that he was proud to wear his surname on his shirt. He went on to spend a further five seasons at Palace, so I can only assume a regular bulk order of ‘i’s was placed with the supplier.”

Very nterestng ndeed – and perhaps inspiration for the increasing number of current-day players to choose abbreviated names with little obvious need.

OK, so this next one involves an extra letter, but it’s a comic caper of the highest order – within the obvious limits of these things – so we’ll include it anyway. In 2004, upon their return to the Premier League and just three years after Riihilahti’s ‘i’s didn’t have it at all, Crystal Palace managed to misspell their own name on their shirts. “I believe the chant by the Selhurst Park crowd at the time went along the lines of ‘there’s only one H in Palace’, chuckles Padraig Fox. “Apparently the club offered to exchange the shirt for free, but the two Palace fans I know kept theirs as a constant reminder of ‘typical Palace’.” Typical Palace, eh?

Because we’re nice, we’ll finish with a personal touch from Peter Newbitt. “For my 18th birthday, my uncle Martyn and his family bought me a West Ham away shirt with ‘Newbitt, 18’ to be emblazoned across the back,” he speaks through sepia. “Unfortunately, West Ham ran out of the number 1 so it remains numberless to this day. Which at least spared me the indignity of having the number of West Ham fans’ public enemy number one and England’s newest retiree on the back of my shirt for the next fifteen years.” He means Frank Lampard, everyone.

KNOWLEDGE ARCHIVE

“Has a goalkeeper ever been booked or sent off for diving?” asks Allam Jeeawody back in 2007.

Where better to start the search than with Arsenal’s Jens Lehmann? He collected eight yellow cards in the Premier League last season, but the best of the lot came at Chelsea when he got up Didier Drogba’s nose by pushing him while the referee had turned his back. Drogba dived pathetically, leapt to his feet and went for revenge with a barge. Lehmann also went down and both players were booked.

It’s probably worth mentioning the infamous incident involving Chile’s Roberto Rojas, a flare and some fake blood, as reported in this previous Knowledge column, but Luis Vallespín’s story about the Real Madrid goalkeeper Paco Buyo comes closest to a goalkeeper booking for diving. “Real were playing Atlético Madrid in December 1988 and Atlético’s Paolo Futre was sent off for punching Buyo,” declares Luis. “But TV replays showed Buyo had fallen to the floor without being punched so he was suspended.” Lehmann would be proud.

Can you help?

“What with Portsmouth only narrowly avoiding dropping into the Conference and Southampton enjoying a great season in the Premier League, I was wondering if there are any other examples of rival clubs enjoying such extreme changes of fortune in such a short period of time,” begins Andrew Chambers. “In 2007-08 Portsmouth were eighth in the Premier League (and won the FA Cup) and Southampton 20th in the second tier – a difference of 32 places in Portsmouth’s favour. Six years later, in 2013-14, Southampton were eighth in the Premier League and Portsmouth 13th in the fourth tier - a difference of 72 places in Southampton’s favour. There are other footballing rivalries I can think of where one club declines, but none where there has been such dramatic swings of fortune within just a few years. Can anyone beat this?”

“Which clubs have been forced to wear shirts with another club’s name on them?” wonders Wayne Ziants. “Twenty years ago Lazio’s shirts were emblazoned with the name of their city rivals when their sponsor was Banco di Roma. A similar thing happened around the same time to Norwich (Norwich & Peterborough Building Society, IIRC), and there must be more examples …”

“Having been taken off on a tangent by Wikipedia, not for the first time, I arrived at the page of Guy Roux,” begins Eamonn Kelly. “Reading on I saw that Roux had resigned from RC Lens during a 2-1 loss to Strasbourg. Upon further investigation I discovered that he actually resigned after the game but my interest in the subject was piqued and hence my question: have any managers resigned from their posts during a game? (Rather than been fired, which we’ve covered before – Knowledge Ed)”

“As of 1 September two teams – Blackpool in the Championship and Crewe Alexandra in League One – are yet to win a point, both having played five games,” writes Ed Richardson. “What is the longest losing streak at the start of a season in the Premier League or Football League?”